Bloomberg cites unnamed “people who have been briefed on the matter” in saying that PS5 owners will finally be able to expand the system’s built-in storage by this summer. The planned firmware update that unlocks this feature will also allow higher cooling fan speeds on the system to prevent overheating, Bloomberg reports.
For games designed for the PS5, owners are currently limited to 667 GB of usable space on the system’s 825 GB high-speed NVMe drive. That’s a pretty strict limit when individual PS5 games can be 50 to 100 GB or more at the top. However, PS5 owners can connect a standard USB hard drive to store backward compatible PlayStation 4 games on the system.
Almost a year ago, Sony announced that the PS5’s storage space would be expandable with certain standard M.2 solid-state drives, which are somewhat shaped like a chewing gum. Sony said it would benchmark some of those drives to ensure compatibility with the PS5’s 5.5 GBps data transfer specifications. But Sony’s Mark Cerny said at the time that the announcement of these officially confirmed PS5-compatible drives “would probably be a bit after the launch of the PS5.” For the Xbox Series X / S line, Microsoft has gone in a different direction by using a proprietary expansion card format to allow for extra fast storage. The only currently available option for that expansion card, a 1TB offering from Seagate, costs a whopping $ 220.
What kind of disc do I need?
M.2 drives that support the PCIe 4.0 standard, which must meet the minimum data bandwidth specifications set by Sony, are currently selling for just $ 150 for 1 TB. That open market price is likely to continue to decline as competition and technology increase over the years. But Microsoft’s storage expansion solution is now available, while PS5 owners are currently waiting for theirs to be activated via a firmware update.
While Sony says it will benchmark drives it can certify as PS5 compliant, other standard PCIe 4.0 drives will likely work with the PS5 after the upcoming firmware update. However, it seems unlikely that Sony will allow cheaper, slower PCIe 3.0 drives to work with the PS5.
“No PCIe 3.0 drive can meet the required specifications,” Cerny said during the discussion of storage expansion options last March.
PS5-compatible M.2 drives are also limited by the size of the PS5’s expansion bay (accessible from under the system’s removable front bezel). Many such drives that come with their own heat sinks or fans do not physically fit the PlayStation 5. The system’s proprietary cooling solutions are essential to ensure the heat sink-free drives operate without failure.
The whole thing promises to be a bit more complicated than the plug-and-play simplicity of external USB drives or even internal hard drive replacements on some recent consoles. But that’s the price you pay for ensuring developers have access to a data loading standard that can stream data to RAM at next-generation speeds.